What the midterms had in common with recent elections in Hungary and Serbia

In April, then-Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán suffered a lopsided defeat in national elections, ending his radically regressive 16-year reign and delivering a brutal loss to those who saw Hungary as an incubator for transforming democratic systems into authoritarian models. Some worried Orbán might follow the autocratic playbook and challenge the results, but the voice of the voters was so overwhelming that he had little choice but to tolerate them.

Six months later, the 14-year reign of Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic also crashed as voters turned sharply against his regime. He attributed his defeat to a series of perceived enemies, including “the deep American state, the one that is also against President Trump,” but he grudgingly conceded defeat anyway — because Serbia’s electorate didn’t give him much of a choice.

This came to mind reading about Donald Trump’s reaction to the midterm elections. The New York Times reported:

President Trump said on Tuesday night that he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results of the midterm elections, and was prepared to work with Democrats.

“We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them,” he said in a phone interview with The New York Times. “We’ll probably work something out.”

These comments were hardly inevitable. On the contrary, nearly six years after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump has spent much of his second term trying to undermine public confidence in the nation’s system of elections, and as recently as last week, when a reporter asked the president whether he’ll respect the will of American voters, regardless of the outcome, he predictably hedged.

The exchange reinforced all kinds of fears about the White House deploying federal officials to seize voting machines and ballots, rejecting the legitimacy of Democratic victories, demanding that Congress refuse to certify successful candidates that Trump doesn’t like, and initiating any number of other potential electoral nightmares and constitutional nightmares.

What few expected was for Trump to tell the New York Times he’s “absolutely willing” to accept the election results, which dovetailed with a Tuesday night interview with CBS News, in which the president said, “My message is, congratulations to the Democrats, and I look forward to working with you for the good of our country.”

Orbán and Vucic confronted election results so overwhelming that the will of the voters was, in a rather literal sense, undeniable. Soon after, a third authoritarian leader confronted the same set of circumstances.

The post What the midterms had in common with recent elections in Hungary and Serbia appeared first on MS NOW.